Shura Cherkassky

Shura Cherkassky was born in Odessa in October 1909, the son of a dentist and a pianist mother who gave him his first lessons. The family fled the Russian Revolution in 1918 and settled in the United States, where he studied at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia with Josef Hofmann from 1925. His American début, at the age of fourteen in 1923, drew critical attention as one of the major piano prodigies of the inter-war years.

His career across the next seventy years was unusually long and unusually varied. He never settled in a single country — he moved between the United States, Britain, Switzerland and Japan across the decades — and held no academic post. His core repertoire was the Romantic and post-Romantic piano literature: Chopin, Liszt, Schumann, Brahms, Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, the Russian and post-Russian repertoire (Scriabin, Prokofiev’s earlier piano works, Stravinsky’s *Petrushka*), and a substantial body of solo recital miniatures by Godowsky, Henselt, Liadov and Medtner. His playing was distinguished by an unusual command of tonal colour and rhythmic flexibility — sometimes criticised in his middle career as eccentric, then increasingly admired as classical orthodoxy in pianism began to feel narrow by comparison. His Decca, EMI and DG recordings from the 1970s onwards became reference performances of the Romantic repertoire.

Cherkassky continued to give recitals into his ninth decade. He died in London in December 1995. Music Preserved’s archive includes a range of his recital work from his decades in Britain.